You can participate in ‘Botany Live’ by running a live-stream session. Live sessions could be a tour through a lab, herbarium, field site, a walk through a Botanic Garden, a behind-the-scenes tour of places that usually aren’t open to the public, interviews, a reportage from a FoPD event, an ‘experiment-along’… There is no limit to your creativity, but we recommend that your session should be short – between 5 and 15 minutes.
There are two ways to get your video promoted here.
Periscope
Periscope is a free app for iOS and Android from the people being Twitter. Once you’ve downloaded it, you’ll need to register (you might find your Twitter name is take). You can also prepare settings. A good one to set it to Tweet when you start broadcasting, so people know you’re live. If you remember to include the hashtag #BotanyLive, then we’ll find it. Another is to not delete your video after 24 hours. This is a good idea, as we’re following sessions from Thursday, May 18 to Sunday, May 21.
For more details, there’s a video below. It’s a bit out of date, there is an Android version now, but it covers the basics of how Periscope works.
If you don’t want to broadcast for long, then why not try Instagram video? You can upload video between 3 to 60 seconds on your Instagram account. It’s perfect if you just want to say a little something about a plant that you can see. Hashtag the video #BotanyLive then we’ll pick it up.
If you let us know before you go live when you’re planning to broadcast then we can also add it to our Events page. We’d like to provide an archive of all content as a legacy. For this, we will ask you to send us URLs of your video, if you uploaded it your organisation’s website or social media channel. Alternatively, we will be able to upload your video for you in a special ‘Botany Live’ YouTube channel.
Please email us at webmaster@aobblog.com for a link to the Google form, in which you can register your live-stream session.
You can download the call for contributions and additional guidance as PDF here: Botany Live Call and Guidance
Video Tips
…and if you’d like to take part, but you don’t think you’re the person for video, here’s some advice.